Hart Island could be viewed as a failure of urban ethics—a place where the city's dead are hidden from view and buried en masse—or it could point to new ways to observe and even revere the deaths of the strangers around us. How to mourn the prematurely dead, the marginalized dead, those who die outside traditional structures, are questions that we must sooner or later face collectively.

As The Sport of Kings draws towards its conclusion, the novel wrangles more and more with questions of the pull of ambition set against the multiplicity of nature, the smallness of humanity, the importance of ethics. It is hard not to see these preoccupations as mirroring the astonishing talents of their author, who has written one of the most daring American novels of recent years, with philosophical profundity, stylistic richness, and moral vision to spare.

In many ways, September 11 was singular: nearly three thousand people, mostly civilians going about their day, killed—incinerated, crushed, vaporized—in the space of two and a half hours. In other ways, the tragedy seems emblematic; the absences and obsessions of how we grieved, instructive. In an era of mass shootings, natural disasters, and terrorist attacks, how to grieve these kinds of death seems just as vital a question as how to prevent them. Perhaps we need to learn how to accord such victims the kind of public, shared memorialization and grief that past generations accorded to the military dead.

Everyone in her circle already knew about the break-up so she said, Why not make something of it? She organized a performance, one night only. She and Anna bought twenty red Anima Sola candles and lit them all around a cavernous art gallery on the east side. They taped mirrors to the walls. The place was filled when Dido walked out into the crowd wearing a simple black dress, her face and shoulders daubed with ashes. She carried a clear bowl full of torn roses to a little table, set an old-fashioned metronome to a slow tempo, and began to tell of her love. Miles away, pictures taken that night would flicker at Aeneas from his laptop when he searched for her.

I have come to think that the question of how to talk about love amid danger, death, and disruption is not a choice between cold, clear-eyed disenchantment and wishful, flinching romanticism. Rather to recall love amid horror is more of an activity, a kind of meditation, a discipline even. As though to search out and remain open to love were a kind of secular liturgy, the performance of which might offer consolation regardless of whatever doubt, darkness, or disillusion may pervade us.

Since the advent of oceanic navigation and trade, people have been drawn to storm-beset coastlines. The discord between a desire for stability and the very real possibility of destruction is intractable. Chronicles of hurricanes from before the mid-20th century are often epics of under-preparation: pre-dawn drownings … the boundaries of cities beat back by the sea. Our own era of "disaster response," satellite imagery (first used in 1960), and improved flood control adds its own risks and ironies — the metrological subchapter of the great drama of modernity, where medicine and technology lengthen and protect more lives while steepening the drop between what is within our control and what is not.